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“But aren’t you trying to change souls with your sermons? Aren’t you trying to make them more acceptable to your God?” Finn leaned forward on the table, his massive hands cupped around his glass of wine. “The soul cannot be so untouchable.”
“With the word of God one can indeed reach into the soul,” Padraig consented. “But no instrument devised by man has the same power.”
“Ah, we have a conflict here,” said Finn. “Sweeney, fill up my glass and top up your own. Any of you others care to join us, help yourselves to whatever you want. That stage is getting set again. See why I prefer to act than to watch?”
“You don’t act, Finn,” Sweeney observed; “you direct.”
He poured the wine for Finn. The last drops from the decanter he shook into his own glass. His sunset face was blazing crimson, with purple only in the shadows. He replaced the empty decanter in the centre of the table and turned up the wick of the low-burning lamp. Shadows flickered on the walls, on the dark sideboard and the cabinets, on the tall clock and the pale porcelain of the Victory.
“So, Padraig,” Finn went on, “you think the word is mightier than the surgeon’s knife.”
“The Word that was in the beginning, yes; the Word of God that was made flesh as Jesus Christ.”
“What do you say to that, young Clifford?” Finn asked. “Does the Word of God tell us more of man and nature, life and death, than your brain and blade will ever reveal?”
“You’re confusing two separate realms, Finn,” Clifford argued in a precise, dry voice. “The brain is a material thing. We probe into it, repair it, understand it, with the aid of material instruments. The soul is immaterial. We change it, if we change it at all, with immaterial instruments: with words, thoughts, ideas, emotions, that reach it through the mind.”
“Body and mind; matter and spirit; material, immaterial.” Finn repeated the words reflectively. “That sounds reasonable enough. Conflict resolved.” He sipped some wine, then looked at Clifford. “You say that the soul is reached through the mind. So you separate mind and soul?”
Clifford looked around the table self-consciously. Michael was asleep with his head fallen forward on his chest. Seamus and Sweeney stared at their wine and looked as though they wished they too were asleep. Only Padraig, facing Finn across the length of the dish-and-bottle-laden table, stayed alert, leaning back in his chair with his left hand dangling and his right hand holding a half-emptied glass of wine.
Manolis Aligizakis 